Mont-orford director puts beach parking reservations online
Mont-orford National Park Director Mario Landry announced beach-goers will need to purchase their beach parking fee online starting July 16.
Quebecers visiting the national park already need to purchase daily access passes, so the administration team believes it will be an easy transition. The decision was made to manage the flow of visitors at Stukely Lake and Fraser Lake.
According to Landry, the park is reaching peak season, and it promises to be another busy summer. The new online tool will help reduce line-ups and avoid disappointing visitors who are turned away at the last minute due to capacity limitations.
“This is an improvement that many visitors have been asking for for a long time. The habit of reserving one’s beach parking permit online should quickly take hold and bear fruit as early as this summer,” said Landry.
And it will act as an informational tool for visitors. If there are no parking spots available, then they will not make the drive over to Mont-orford. The beach parking permit grants access to both lakes. It also avoids the need to complete a transaction at the park.
The permits will be available up to 30 days before a person’s visit at sepaq. com/reservation. There are roughly 300 parking spots available to visitors.
There will be a limited number of spaces reserved for seasonal parking decal holders.
Mont-orford National Park Conservation and Education Department Manager Claudia Lascelles told The Record that the administration team already has a handle on the capacity situation. This online tool will mostly serve visitors.
“It depends on the day and the temperature. Sometimes there are long lines to get in, and when people get to the ticket office, we tell them there are no more spots,” said Lascelles.
When asked about whether visitors will find this process more cumbersome, Lascelles explained that many of them have already had to purchase a daily access pass to the park online. They are used to it, and she noted that there was a significant increase last year.
“If they have the chance to see before leaving the house if there are spots available or not, it would allow them to make the decision to come to the park or not, rather than showing up with no spots available,” she said.
The new online tool will also allow the park to adjust on the fly. If, for example, they are expecting to be full one day, but it turns out there are more spots available, the park will update its website, so that people to can make last-minute beach plans.
Lascelles was unable to provide any concrete numbers, though. She does not know how many people are at the beach at the same time because they base their information off the number of vehicles. They had originally cut their parking lot to 150 spots to follow health measures.
“We saw an increase, it’s certain, I couldn’t tell you by how much, but it’s certain, absolutely certain, that we had more visitors than usual,” said Lascelles, adding that they will soon find out how many people visited the park last summer.
She also told The Record that while they needed to put people on furlough throughout the pandemic, the staff remained mostly intact, waiting for an opportunity to return to work. They haven’t been struggling to find employees like other sectors in Quebec.
“All of our positions have been filled, we have our entire lifeguard team, we were lucky, it is going well,” said Lascelles. “The measures that we are putting in place are really linked to the pandemic and we want to make things easier for people accessing the park.”